Making Shifts
by SCWLC
Summary: When Connor takes Stephen's place in the Menagerie, a lot of things change. AU


Title: Making Shifts  
Author: SCWLC  
Disclaimer: Really owning nothing anyone recognises, especially the direct quotes and characters. I super-don't own those.  
Summary: When Connor takes Stephen's place in the Menagerie, a lot of things change. AU  
Series: Well, obviously the end of S2 and moving into S3.  
Rating: NC-17  
Pairing: Stephen/Connor eventually.  
A/N: This was originally posted on LiveJournal, so it still bears the points where I'd ended a chapter, in effect. However, I'm not going to rebreak this up just to maintain those breaks. Yes, the ending's a little abrupt, but it was about to go off the rails, so . . . well . . . I'll let you all make up your minds. Thanks again, Luka, for the brit-picking you did in the comments. This fic does owe a debt to _Saving Stephen_.

* * *

It all starts when he reaches out and clocks Nick to take his place inside Leek's Menagerie of Doom so the animals don't get out and kill everyone. Because the delay of doing so allows Connor to blow right past him and into the room, slamming the door behind himself.

Connor's just locked himself in with a gorgonopsid, a venomous millipede, a pair of raptors, a sabre toothed tiger, one of those predators from the future they didn't have a name for yet and one of the things that had kidnapped Abby. There was probably something else in there, but by then Stephen's brain was stuttering as he realised there was no way Connor was going to survive. He and Nick pounded on the door, desperately trying to convince the kid to get out, not to throw his life away, Nick trying everything from flattery to guilting Connor into coming out. "Who's going to handle fixing the damage to the ADD if you're dead, Connor!"

"Hey, I'm not the important one," he says with unconcealed terror as the whites of his eyes belie the casual words. "Besides, no one at the ARC even likes me that much, so it's not like you'll miss me and Abby'll be happy to get her flat back."

Stephen rather doubts Abby will want it back with the knowledge that it came from Connor committing suicide, but he just bangs on the door again, shouting, "Dammit Connor, get out of there!"

He ignores them both now and feints at the gorgonopsid. Stephen vaguely wonders if this is a plan, or if Connor's just trying to speed up the inevitable. He can't blame him for wanting to make it go faster, rather than seeing his death approach slowly. Somehow, though, it tempts the creature into lunging, and Connor, with one of his bursts of sudden physical talent that only seem to be brought on by near-death situations, dives out of the way, and the snarling lizard crashes into the smilodon.

Chaos seems to spread outward from that moment, and somehow Connor slips and slides and dashes and makes it to a sparking panel on the wall without dying. His hands, steady and skilled rip into the wires, disconnecting and reconnecting, twisting and tugging, working to some plan all his own.

He doesn't see the predator leap from the wall on top of him, his scream tearing through Stephen and Nick like a hot knife through butter, only far more destructive. Maybe a buzzsaw through flesh.

Neither can tear themselves away, and watch as the scent of Connor's blood seems to incense the other creatures. They lunge, and one of the raptors pulls the predator off Connor, prompting another scream as the move rips open further the vicious wounds left by the mutant bat that had been taking its time in killing him.

Somehow, though, Connor pulls himself back up, and shaking, he begins at the panel again as the predators in the room tear at each other, caught up in battles between themselves. They all want the prey animal against the wall by the sparking panel, but they have to take out the others first. Connor's losing a lot of blood, but the waistcoat and then his shirt both go, one after the other, used to temporarily blind attacking animals, covering them in the copiously spilling blood and making them into distractions for the others.

He's holding his own as he works the wiring.

Stephen watches and thinks he'd never have managed, but recognises Abby in the way Connor's managing to predict behaviours. Nick had said the kid was brilliant, but it's like he's pulling together every piece of animal information he's ever seen or come across to keep himself in one piece.

Suddenly his legs give out and he slides to the floor, the blood that's all over now preventing him from getting any sort of purchase. Nick mutters something about Claudia and pteranodons, but Stephen can't think of Cutter's vanished possibly imaginary girlfriend right now. He pounds at the door again. "Connor!" _Not now. Not when he's so close to surviving them all. Just a little longer and help might come._"Connor! Get up!"

Connor's eyes look dull and empty as his gaze slowly moves to the door where Stephen is banging desperately and shouting at him to not give up. The smilodon is dead, beaten by the gorgonopsid. It had been no match for the raptors, taking one out, but losing when the predator had briefly tag-teamed with the remaining one. The walrus thing had been bitten by the millipede, but its death throes had distracted the other predator and had allowed the millipede to get the jump on it.

There were only two left, and maybe, just maybe, Connor could hold out. If Lester and the soldiers got there in time . . . if Connor didn't give up . . . if the last two animals chose to fight each other first . . .

"Connor! Don't you dare die now!"

Something sparked in Connor, Stephen didn't know, didn't even care if it had been him or just the desire to survive. What mattered was that Connor struggled and slowly got himself to his feet. Reached into the panel and did something. Just as the last to creatures lunged toward him, apparently planning to kill him before they finished each other off, a small explosion seemed to detonate from the panel, and Connor was flung back a few feet, hitting the concrete floor hard and leaving a streak of blood behind as he skidded.

And an electric fence came online, separating Connor safely behind it from the two monsters, who turned on each other in frustration over their prey being denied to them.

"Yes! Brilliant!" Stephen found himself laughing as the electricity now kept Connor safe, kept him from being hurt more. He and Nick exchanged joyful grins that the nerdy tech had pulled a miracle out of his silly fedora.

But Connor isn't moving and there's so much blood.

Lester's soldiers show up, and Stephen can barely bring himself to back away from his vigil at the tiny window in the door. He'd planned to go in there. He'd been expecting to die, to save Nick and everyone else, to expiate his sins for believing Helen when he should have trusted Nick . . . Cutter. He didn't even have the right to call the man by his first name anymore, did he?

He would have died, he liked to think he'd have died well, but Connor's technical genius had got the boy . . . no, man, Connor was no boy for what he had managed that day. Connor's brilliance may have saved him, but there was no way of knowing now. Precious minutes were being lost, trickling away like the blood coming from the gaping injuries all over Connor's mauled body while they tried to get into the room. Then as they had to fight the monsters to a standstill before it was safe to even think about getting Connor out of the cage that had saved him and was now keeping him from the medical attention he needed.

The medics were right there, vibrating, calibrating instruments and prepping for whatever Connor might need if he was still alive. Abby was crouched by the humming electrical fence, cursing Connor out and telling him that if he didn't come through this okay she was going to do terrible things to his Xbox and burn his collection of Doctor Who merchandise. Her eyes were fixed on him, and Stephen knelt beside her, unable to find anything to say to the young man who he'd shown so much contempt for so many times.

Both of them stared unwaveringly at the only thing keeping them sane. The nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. The movement was so slight, sometimes Stephen wondered if they were both imagining it, pretending that the already dead fourth member of their team was still alive, already in the first denial of the loss of a friend and teammate.

It took an eternity for the electricity to go down, and with a visible shudder, he and Abby both saw Connor take one shuddering breath, relax, and stop moving entirely. "No!"

The barrier went down, but they couldn't run to his side. The medics pushed them away, more electricity now being brought to bear as they desperately shocked his stopped heart.

Nick, who had often tended to bury himself in talking and working and doing during crises like this had been practically flinging himself up and down the room and the corridors, making a nuisance of himself and trying to find solutions. He now finally joined them, saying in a shaky voice, "You'd have been proud of him, Abby. I think what got him through was what he learned from you."

"Don't talk like he's dead," Abby snapped.

"Clear!" shouted the medic again, and Connor's body arched on the trolley.

"I didn't mean . . ." Cutter trailed off helplessly as the paddles shocked his former student again and again.

Suddenly a voice shouted, "I've got a rhythm! Let's get him to the hospital!"

Stephen felt the strength leave his legs suddenly and he knew without looking that Cutter was staggering to the wall next to him, while Abby had just sunk to the floor, clutching Rex and sobbing with relief. On some level he knew Connor might not be out of the woods yet, but for now it was enough to let the joy buoy them through the moment.

* * *

Lester had arranged something with the hospital to allow them in to see Connor at all hours of the day and night. When they had all exhausted themselves repeatedly, staying up all hours by Connor's comatose side, Jenny had finally stepped in, organising them into shifts, and putting herself on one as well, just to keep the length down and so that someone would be there from the team when Connor woke up.

Eight in the morning to two, Abby was there, two to eight in the evening was Jenny's shift, Cutter took up the eight at night to two in the morning, and Stephen got the last shift. It was wreaking merry hell with his internal clock, but Jenny was right that it meant they all got some sleep, always had someone up to handle an anomaly and always had someone there with Connor.

Abby had insisted that they talk to him, citing some silly study that no one really believed in that coma patients could hear everything that was going on around them. So, Abby always arrived with one of Connor's ridiculous comic books or movie tie-in novels, sometimes with Connor's laptop, reading him updates on conspiracy and sci-fi blogs that he loved.

Cutter, with a rather disturbed look on his face in the face of Abby's insistence, had taken to reading to Connor from paleontological journals and critiquing all of Connor's old papers. Lecturing the young man on what he was going to insist on for Connor's viva. Apparently Cutter had decided that Connor needed a bludgeon to make people respect him. After all, Stephen was Cutter's official assistant with a long CV of experience, Abby could declare herself a professional in the field of animal behavioural study and Cutter was a professor. Connor had nothing of that sort. He was a drop-out from a PhD program and had nothing to show that he was as brilliant and skilled in his way as the others. It would mean Connor could turn back a sneer by insisting people respect his title, at the very least.

Jenny's tack had been gossip. When she'd run out of gossip from the ARC, she'd moved on to celebrity gossip, and when that ran out she read him newspapers of every kind, even the silly supermarket ones about alien love children of Elvis.

Stephen hadn't completely let Abby bully him, usually picking up some random book, and making sure to read some of it aloud about when she was supposed to show up of a morning. But mostly he just sat there silently, wondering how he could have missed so much about who Connor really was.

It had been easy to dismiss him at first. Coltish and silly, blundering about and trying to pretend he knew more about what was going on than he clearly did. Stephen had been, quite frankly, relieved when Connor had been suckered in by his friends' prank and then booted off the team.

Waking up to discover that the idiot had somehow won his way back in while Stephen had been unconscious had taken him rather aback. Connor's constant state of being flustered by nearly everything had always made Stephen shake his head in disbelief. He'd taken a rather malicious pleasure in making Connor uncomfortable, and privately was rather amused at the way the kid could always be trusted to get chased by something, fall over or make an idiot of himself in some way.

Watching Connor survive a gauntlet he knew he never could have made it through sent uncomfortable tendrils of memory through Stephen.

_"The creature we found was some kind of scutosaurus, late Permian era. That footprint? Definitely not the same animal. If we are talking late Permian, then this little charmer is the prime suspect. It's a gorgonopsid. It's a compact killing machine, and it's got incredible power."_

He'd known exactly where to look and what it was. No, he wasn't a physical sort of person, but knowing how tall something was, seeing the summary of what it ought to be capable of and Connor's guesses from comparative anatomy and a variety of studies gave Stephen an edge in knowing where to look and how in tracking. More, Cutter had told him in admiring tones that if it hadn't been for Connor's quite-thorough database of prehistory, they might never have found the arthropleura.

Still, perhaps Connor should have been what he'd called himself, logistics, and been on call from the safety of an office at first at the Home Office and then the ARC. Somewhere he could ply his computers in safety to the benefit of those in the field.

And what had Connor done when the mosasaur's anomaly had opened, the one that had brought Helen thoroughly back into his and Cutter's lives?

_"The reservoir's land locked, right? Well, I made this mark at water level earlier. The water level's fallen 40 centimetres since then. This isn't a reservoir any more, it's a tidal lake. The water's literally pouring out of it."_

While everyone else wibbled about, taking water samples and staring at the reservoir as though it would somehow magically reveal what was going on, Connor had thought simply and pragmatically and got them proof the anomaly was still there and open. Abby had been all kinds of impressed at Connor driving off the marine reptile with nothing more than a paddle.

And he, Stephen had focussed on the fact that Connor hadn't been heroically diving with himself and Cutter, had focussed on the second half of Abby's story where Connor had taken the moment to grope her, and had let himself be amused at Connor's posturing over Allison. Posturing he now admitted, deep in the privacy of his own mind, that may have been Connor protecting Abby's interests and chiding Stephen for leading the girl on. Which he may have deserved, if only for having pretended he didn't remember asking her out when he'd hallucinated she was Helen. Not to mention that Allison was just a friend he sometimes slept with when they were both wanting a quick shag, and the lie had been to save himself trouble, not to protect Abby or anything else.

He'd concentrated on Connor's idiocy in getting his friends involved and had put from his mind a young man who held such faith in his friends that he stepped in front of the guns and laser sights of half a dozen people to talk his friend down so that the sick young man could die with some dignity and not in a hail of bullets. And he'd done it too, with sensitivity and strength that Stephen had uncomfortably ignored because it conflicted too much with the picture he'd built up in his head of Connor, and ignoring the camaraderie that had been growing between them in spite of everything.

"_Fluke."_

"Jealous."

Connor's revenge as Stephen was left holding the creepy, sneaky, horrible thing with its flicking tongue and weird footless locomotion.

_"I'm not touching it."_

Which turned out to be complete fakery as Connor had finally rolled his eyes and snickered, handling the slithery thing with ease, informing Stephen he'd once had a pet constrictor, albeit one much smaller, when he was younger, and getting an appreciative smile out of Abby when he happily let it crawl all over him. He'd waltzed out of there, letting it poke its head out from time to time, while Stephen tried not to look like he was completely weirded out by snakes. Ryan had been particularly amused that the Mighty Hunter (how had they learned Connor's nickname for him?) couldn't handle the baby snake, but the geek could.

In fact, despite the fact that he was the most vulnerable of them, the one who had the least in the way of survival skills and the one who was most likely to be eaten some day, Connor just walked fearlessly in after them, again and again, and Stephen couldn't even make the excuse he was ignorant or overconfident. If anything, Connor had no self-confidence and knew better sometimes than Stephen even did what these things could do to him.

"You couldn't have just been some piss-poor excuse for a doctorate student?" he asked Connor softly. "Or just the impractical research assistant or . . . anything than someone so brilliant he can survive something even I don't think I could."

"Think a lot of yourself, don't you?" came the soft, half-strangled sounding reply from the bed.

His heart nearly stopped, and Stephen looked down to see Connor's dark eyes, looking black in the shadows of a room with the lights off for sleep, as though it had made a difference until now. His face was a pale slash, but for where there was a claw mark through one of his eyebrows. It had healed enough to be left alone, and Stephen wondered at the luck that had let Connor keep the eye. His dark hair and general pallor meant that Connor looked like a ghost, some sort of horrible spirit sent to get revenge on the living for something.

Stephen shook off the morbid fantasy and hit the button to page the nurse. "Well, you keep calling me Mighty Hunter, and you've got Lester's little army calling me that, too."

Connor smiled weakly and asked, "Is everyone okay? Abby? Rex?"

"Yes, Abby's illegal flatmate is fine," Stephen said, amused that Connor thought of Rex as part of 'everyone'. He took a deep breath, wanting to say to Connor that he was sorry, that he wouldn't treat him like a halfwit country bumpkin anymore, that he respected the other man and that he'd promise to stop calling Connor a kid, even in his own head.

"Lester must be really grateful for the NHS right now," Connor said. "Imagine if this was America. He'd be paying through the nose for all this."

It was such a departure from anything Stephen could have expected, he burst into laughter. It was a tad hysterical, but he was just so relieved that none of the doctor's dread predictions of Connor losing all cognitive ability had been right and he seemed to be functioning fine mentally. "I'm sure," he said.

"It's not that funny," Connor had said with a small smile.

Stephen had settled by then and replied, "Well, it's a little unlike you to comment on that."

"Tom was in political science and his focus was on international politics," Connor said. "We may have decided we were better off friends, but you don't date a bloke that long without picking up a few things."

As the nurses came in, shoving Stephen aside to do their jobs, the lab assistant and tracker found himself undergoing another paradigm shift regarding Connor Temple.

Any revelations about Connor and Tom and who he had or had not dated had to be put aside, though, because it turned out the doctor's fears about Connor were real. There _was_ something wrong with him. It became clear to Stephen, because while Connor seemed to pass all the doctor's tests with flying colours, he wasn't being _Connor_about it.

The jokes and pop culture references that had tended to pepper any conversation he had were missing. And it wasn't like Connor was just trying not to go off-topic or something of the like. No, it was as though he wasn't even thinking of them. Stephen tossed a few one-liners Connor's way, things about Doctor Who and Star Wars that would normally have got him a lecture of amazing complexity for some third-rate excuse for drama that shouldn't be _able_to have that many facts and figures attached to it. Instead Connor took them at face value with nary a wince.

When the doctor started talking about Connor's condition, descending into medical jargon, Stephen truly knew things were wrong, because of the four of them, Connor had always been the only one who could follow it all without a wince. Normally a doctor could get as esoteric as he or she wished with Connor, because Connor understood.

But he didn't. Not now.

Stephen felt a lump in his throat as Connor turned panicked eyes to him, now aware that something was wrong. "What's wrong with me?" he demanded abruptly. "I can't . . . why can't I understand?"

The doctor didn't look phased, and Stephen briefly considered punching the man. "I apologise," he said. "I sometimes forget myself, in layman's terms-"

Stephen cut him off. "What Connor means is that he's never had to have anything put in layman's terms for him before. He's smarter than everyone in this hospital combined, which is why he's working for the Home Office with the kind of security clearance you can only dream about." Stephen snapped it out, hoping he could at least reassure Connor that he understood the fear that was making Connor pale and his eyes blank. "You said before there might have been damage to his brain from the blood loss. Is there an MRI or something you can do to check?"

The doctor looked doubtful and began wittering on about averages. "I don't care about average capabilities, doctor," Stephen sneered at the man. "I care about the fact that Connor's normal cognitive abilities are so impressive, that average for him is like brain-damaged halfwit to the rest of us. And if you can't get tests done on him to see what's gone wrong and if anything can fix it, you'd damn well better find someone who can."

Connor looked close to tears and shakily said, "Maybe we should just listen to the doctor, Stephen. I didn't get that bit about statistics of recovery-"

Something smug in the doctor's face made Connor stop. His eyes narrowed in clear concentration, then suddenly widened. "Call Lester," he demanded. "I want a _competent_neuro - brain specialist."

Stephen was on the phone a moment later, leaving messages with the team and Lester and asking Jenny to come down quickly. More because he wanted her ability to cut someone down to nothing with a few choice words than anything else. He still felt sick. Connor not knowing the right word for something in a scientific area? He glared at the doctor who was still trying to convince them that merely average was completely fine and that Connor wasn't as brilliant as they thought he was.

On the verge of losing his temper, Stephen did something he hadn't done since he was in a bar in the US when he was twenty and stupid. He blatantly pulled out the pistol he now carried on him all the time in case of anomaly and ostentatiously started to check it over.

The doctor paled and fled the room. Stephen immediately put it away and sat down next to Connor. "Don't worry. Lester will find someone and we'll have you prancing mental circles around the rest of us in no time."

There was a watery smile on Connor's face as he said, "It took me a minute, but I remembered that look on the doctor's face. It was just like Professor Morrison that time when he'd arranged to drop my grade because I'd shown up him in class."

Humbert Morrison was an arse, in Stephen's opinion, and the notion that an undergraduate Connor had got the better of him was just one more amusing addition to the character that was Connor. Actually, now that he thought about it . . .

"He was in fine fettle a few years back about some titchy honours student who'd 'tried' to debunk his theory of mammalian evolutionary superiority," Stephen said. "That wouldn't happen to have been you?"

Connor snorted. "The man's practically a creationist the way he subscribes to Lamarckian theories of evolution. The concepts he'd been spouting off were entirely rebuttable." He launched into the story, but as it unfolded, Connor became more and more distressed. His logic was plain and irrefutable, the reasoning brilliant, the explanations cogent and his conclusions were perfection. It took Stephen a minute to understand why Connor was so upset. Normally all the logic Connor was following was so obvious to the younger man that he bypassed it entirely in his explanations because he honestly couldn't see how anyone didn't see it. He must have felt like his mind had been abruptly stunted by this slowdown.

"You should have forgotten all about the aliens and just handed that in to Cutter for your thesis. He would have supported you the whole way just to put one over on Morrison," Stephen told him.

"It's not as . . . it's not any good," Connor muttered. "It's like my brain's wrapped up in something and I can't think." He was on the verge of tears. "Normally I'm at the part where he went purple by now."

In spite of himself, Stephen snickered. "Sorry," he said when Connor gave him a hurt look. "Morrison, purple," he said by way of explanation. He got another smile, but it quickly crumpled. "Oh, Connor," he murmured, and settled onto the bed next to Connor, wrapping an arm around the trembling super-genius.

By the time Cutter, Abby and Jenny showed up, Connor had gone back to sleep, clinging to Stephen like a child to a favourite stuffed toy. Stephen managed to edge away, but only by leaving his jacket behind. Connor immediately curled into a ball around it.

Out in the hall, Stephen explained what was going on, and vented a bit of his anger at the condescending doctor in Jenny's direction. "Mostly I was just hoping you could get them to take a look at the damage," Stephen said. Then he sighed and sagged against the wall. "Not that _they'll_believe there's damage if they talk to Connor."

Cutter frowned. "What do you mean, Stephen?"

"I mean, Connor's . . . you know how normally he's just that much smarter than everyone else and the only reason he looks idiotic has to do with practicality rather than sheer intellect?" Stephen asked.

Abby nodded immediately. "It's the way he can build the ADD and still not work the security chain on the door in the flat."

"He can't?" asked Jenny gaping.

"Nope," Abby told her. "I've never explained it to him either. It's too funny watching him poke at it." She grinned. "When he couldn't, he turned the microwave into an alarm on the door instead."

Stephen shook his head. That was Connor all over. "Anyhow, if you were introduced to him now, he'd seem like a normal person and tremendously smart. But Connor's feeling the difference. He said it was like his brain was wrapped up in something."

"Oh, Connor," Abby said softly, and stared through the door at him.

Jenny nodded. "I'll get on it. If there's that much of a change, there must be something showing the damage." She turned smartly, her heels clacking purposefully down the hall. Abby was already curled up in the chair next to Connor, so Stephen took the moment to pull Cutter aside. "You know the thesis you want Connor to do?"

"Yes?" Cutter asked, his eyes wandering back to the young man's room. "What about it?"

"Forget whatever you want him to do and ask him to tell you about the time he pissed off Morrison. It's just a bit brilliant."

Cutter perked up, because he hated Humbert Morrison about the same as he hated Leek and Celtic. Stephen usually wore green on match days because it made Nick sputter. He vaguely wondered if Connor had a team, and if so, who it was. Or if it was cricket or rugby or even something American or esoteric. Or if Connor had never watched sports at all. There was a lot about Connor Stephen hadn't bothered to find out, and he suddenly wanted to know, didn't want to be left wondering what he hadn't known.

"What's it about?"

"You know that thesis about mammalian evolutionary superiority that he made his career off of?" Stephen asked.

Cutter nodded, making a face. It was an unassailable bastion of wrongness that no one had been able to properly take apart.

"Connor destroyed it in class one day. The words 'Morrison turned purple' apparently come up in the story," Stephen said with a grin.

Cutter grinned and almost skipped with glee into the room to wait with Abby. The ability to destroy Morrison alone would make Connor into Cutter's favourite person for the next little while. Now that Connor wasn't in a coma anymore, Stephen just wanted to go home for a while to think in peace and quiet about things. Abby, Cutter and Jenny would watch out for Connor and make sure the doctors didn't take advantage of Connor's new average state, so Stephen slipped away to the silence of his flat.

Once he was there he found himself wandering aimlessly through, looking at the plain walls he normally didn't bother with because he was never home and the bed with the serviceable coverlet that he'd never bothered to change because everything else he owned was so white it didn't clash.

And here and there were the small reminders of Helen. A lump of bandages in the bin, a bit of fossilised dung from before she'd vanished, her preferred brand of beer in his fridge, the fucking pillowcase and bed that still smelled like her.

Connor had nearly died because of her fucking games with Leek and Cutter and him and . . . what the hell had he been thinking?

He started scooping up the reminders, dropping them with distaste into the metal rubbish bin, then lighting and tossing in one more, a lighter she'd given him as a gift before that expedition to Australia. The smoke filled the room in no time, setting off the smoke alarm and he couldn't bring himself to care, just reached up and yanked the thing open and the battery out.

But the bed still stank of Helen, and he couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand what his stupidity had nearly caused, _had_caused, because Connor's mind wasn't the only thing damaged, there were broken bones that needed healing, gashes and cuts and contusions and burns on Connor's hands from where he'd ignored the sparks and fire to get the barrier up.

Somehow he got everything, from the mattress to the blankets and sheets and pillows and quilt. Fled until he was somewhere that masqueraded as isolated and stared at what was tantamount to all the bedding he owned. He'd already got rid of the lighter, but he'd set fires with less, and there was still petrol in the car tank. He siphoned some out, just to speed things up, and a few minutes later had the whole of it ablaze in the middle of a concrete warehouse.

He turned his back on it and walked away, just like he'd walked away from the scorpion and from Lester's office back when this all had begun and Lester had been so insistent it was a one-time thing. This time, he felt good, somehow. Lighter.

At least until he got home and realised he had nowhere to sleep now.

A small voice in his head suggested that since Connor had clearly been interested in men in the past and Stephen was quite attractive if bunches of people did say so themselves, maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed.

He shook the mad little thought away and went to sleep on the couch. Clearly he was getting a little punch drunk.

* * *

Stephen woke up to a splash of cold water to his face and a sharp voice telling him, "You are an idiot!"

He was off the couch and in a defensive crouch on the floor, reaching for anything he could use as a weapon before he was fully awake. Then he realised that Jenny was standing in his flat, glaring at him, beyond furious, while Cutter stood behind her, some combination of angry and amused himself. "What the hell were you thinking?" she demanded.

"What?" Stephen shook his head, sending a spray of droplets everywhere as he tried to fully wake up and understand what was going on. "How did you get in-"

"You gave me a spare key, remember?" Cutter inquired from behind her. "Although I think she was about willing to borrow a few of the SAS to knock your door down after she found out." His amusement turned into complete disapproval as he added, "I don't really blame her, either. That was incredibly stupid."

Stephen thought back to all the fires he set the day before and winced. "Okay, so maybe the fire in the warehouse was a bad idea-"

"Fire in the warehouse!" Jenny shrieked. "What the hell were you doing setting fire to warehouses? In fact, what happened in here? It's bad enough you were threatening the doctor with a gun-"

"Oh." Stephen said as he realised what they were talking about. "I didn't threaten anyone," he argued hastily.

She had stopped listening and was on her mobile. "James, I think we may need to do more than just deal with the issue of the hospital and dangerous weapon charges. Stephen just said something about setting fire to a warehouse yesterday." She eyed him. "I'm not totally certain he didn't try to burn down his flat either. There's a lot of smoke damage in here."

"I didn't set fire to a warehouse," Stephen said. "I just . . . burned some things in one."

Cutter was sifting through the things in the rubbish bin, coming up with the fossil dung. "This wasn't going to burn," he commented idly. "Rocks don't tend to do that well." He continued to sift through the ashes and remnants with the same concentrated focus he'd brought to every dig Stephen had seen him on. "I guess Helen's been picking your locks a lot, lately." He held up a cracked beer bottle, broken from the heat.

One of the soldiers, Stephen couldn't bring his name to mind at the moment, came wandering out of the bedroom then. "You know, beds are a lot more comfortable with a mattress."

He buried his head in his hands. This was a little too humiliating.

"So, that's what happened to that," Cutter was saying as he glared disapprovingly at the copy of Robert Bakker's first book Stephen had tossed in as well. "That was my favourite work of fiction. I wondered where it had gone. Helen gave it to you?"

It had survived the fire after the beer bottles had broken, soaking everything in there with beer. "Fiction?" he asked inanely. Bakker was a paleontologist and the book was just one of many on the topic of dinosaurian evolution.

"Well, the science in these has never been remotely solid," Cutter pointed out.

Jenny was finished and back on a roll. "So, what precisely were you thinking, pulling a gun, in a hospital no less? Right next to Connor?"

He felt as if he was being scolded by his old primary teacher, Miss Pratt the Bat they'd all called her. "I was thinking that that . . ." well, now he couldn't call anyone a prat, that might just make him have hysterics, "Tosser needed to get out before he upset Connor any more than he was."

"Stephen, Lester arranged for you to be able to carry that at all times because of the anomalies, not so that you could use it to threaten people."

"I didn't threaten him," he muttered mutinously. She was turning more Bat-like every second. "I just took it out and checked the clip."

Her sigh spoke volumes on the idiocy that was him, how exhausted she was going to be cleaning up after his mess, how annoyed she was that he'd made her life more difficult with a soupcon of resignation to having to put up with it. "You are quite lucky that he's generally disliked around the hospital, and that when security looked in they decided to leave the 'nice gay couple' alone."

Stephen blinked.

It wasn't that he'd never experimented, but it was Connor. Connor the-

He cut off the usual derision in his thoughts. It was a bad habit he had to break himself of, especially after what Connor had just been through.

. . . _maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed._

He shook his head to clear it. "Not funny," he said, playing for time. Nick shot him a sharp look, and Stephen chose to ignore him. Better not to give the man any more ammunition.

"Oh, I'm not joking," she said, clearly enjoying the process of making him horribly uncomfortable. "In any event, Lester's sent people down to wave clearances about, and now they all think Connor's some sort of secret government scientist and you're his bodyguard."

The SFs were going to be taking the piss about this for the rest of _eternity_.

Jenny was meanwhile laying down the law, effectively telling him that he'd better behave himself, and more than that, he was off of any anomaly work, barring an emergency, until Connor was out of the hospital to maintain his cover of being a bodyguard. Then she ordered him to shower, since he smelled like his flat, and that smelled like beer and soot and ashes and some things best not considered.

Discovering that Helen had managed to leave sanitary towels in his bathroom nearly made him scream, since he hadn't known about those at all, and after his shower he grabbed a bag with crosswords and books and magazines and some other entertaining odds and ends, and threw the towels into the bin as he passed, and nearly added a lit match to it. But he knew he was already on thin ice, and if he went too far he might get himself banned from Connor's room. All it took was remembering the terrified look on Connor's face as the doctor tried to bully him to stiffen Stephen's resolve not to let his anger at himself interfere with getting Connor back to normal.

He avoided Cutter like the devil and made it to the hospital in time to be met by Abby. "You pulled a _gun_ on a _doctor_? What were you thinking?"

"I didn't pull a gun on that idiot. I took it out of the holster, checked the clip, and then he ran away," he protested.

Connor looked rather perky as he said, "It was cool, Abbs. Like an episode of _Supernatural_."

Abby just shook her head. "I didn't think much of your tv before, Connor, but now that you're taking advantage of a head injury to watch Corrie, I just . . . I'm just going to go before you drag me down."

Connor made a face at her retreating back, then turned to Stephen. "It was kind of stupid of you to do that."

"Jenny's already gone after me about it," Stephen said. "Anything from anyone else will just be weak." He sat in the chair by the bed. "Did she tell you-"

"That you're my bodyguard because I'm so important that some terrorists tried to torture me into revealing state secrets," Connor finished, yeah. "I was joking when I suggested it."

Stephen shook his head in disbelief. "Well, I suppose as long as you don't start singing, I'll cope."

"Huh?" Connor frowned, clearly looking for the reference.

"The Bodyguard? Whitney Houston?" Stephen prompted.

Connor looked revolted. "Oh, that was awful. That song didn't go away until secondary. Fran Thompkins chased the boys she liked all around the schoolyard singing that. God that was horrible."

Stephen asked curiously, "She chase you any?"

Connor's laugh was a little bitter. "No. I was the weird kid who liked dinosaurs long after they stopped being cool. The one on school trips to the museum who'd correct the tour guide's pronunciation."

"Still, must be nice to have known all along what you wanted," Stephen said. "I didn't figure anything out until I was in the summer after my second year at university. I had to make up a science credit and there was a paleontological expedition involved in the course. Getting to be outside and away from classrooms for it decided me as far as taking the course went." He smiled a little, remembering. "Watching Cutter point out where the bones were and how it was all put together got me interested. I changed my area of focus and did whatever I could to be qualified to go into the field."

"How'd you get from university to being the Mighty Hunter?" Connor asked, a bit of mischief in his voice.

"Being pretty stupid. I spent a gap year in America learning to hunt somewhere there was still wilderness. It's where I learned how to use a machine gun."

Connor's mouth opened for a moment, then closed. He looked defeated again all of a sudden. "I should have something to say to that," he said sadly. "But . . . it's not there." He swallowed, his eyes losing their focus a moment. "I'm happy I'm not dead, really I am. But I can't . . . I feel so stupid!"

"Don't say that," Stephen snapped. Connor's turn to despair had him frightened. There was just something in the way Connor looked, so bereft, that made something in his chest clench. "You are not stupid. You've merely been downgraded from genius to extremely smart."

"It's not good enough," Connor told him. "It's not enough. I can't work on anything for Cutter or that ARC like this, and I don't just mean my hands." He gestured with the heavily bandaged appendages. "If I tried to build the ADD now it would take me months. We don't have that kind of time. I need to finish those calculations for Cutter, and I can't even follow my own maths." He gestured at the laptop on the table next to him.

Stephen didn't even pause to think as he pulled Connor into his arms, holding the younger man as he broke down.

Connor had barely recovered from his moment of despair when they were interrupted by a couple porters who were to take him down to radiology and get some CT and MRI scans of the potential damage done to Connor's brain. Stephen in his capacity as imaginary bodyguard followed down the hall, trying to think of some way to distract Connor before he hyperventilated himself into intensive care.

"So," he grabbed onto the first topic he could think of. "That gap year I was in the U.S. I wound up falling in with a mad batch of NRA members. They were all survivalists and I spent a good few months living in a compound in the middle of nowhere. I'm fairly certain they had more guns and ammunition there than the entire British Army."

Connor turned to stare at him. The porters stopped looking him in the eye and began to squirm. "What? Like a cult?"

Stephen thought about it. "Yes and no. I think, here, yes. As in, in the UK we'd think it's a cult, but America's so . . . large, there are things people get away with, lots of them, in a lot of different places, and it's harder to call it a cult. Anyhow, there wasn't any sort of religious aspect to it. Not really."

Connor's eyes were so enormous, Stephen couldn't keep the amused smile from his face. "So, you were living in a weird American compound for months?"

"Well, not always in the compound," he said. "See, there are a lot of areas in America where hunting for subsistence remains a lot more a way of life than here. We're all set so close together here that it's . . . harder to get that isolated." Stephen shrugged. "I learned a lot about tracking and guns and wildlife." He'd also learned a lot about ignorance and poverty, but he didn't want this to get depressing for Connor, who he was trying to cheer up and distract. "After all that I wound up in Canada for a while too," he continued.

"What was that like?" Connor asked. "I nearly chose to go to university there, you know, closer to the Alberta Badlands and all, but we had some family issues and I had to stay closer to home."

"Oddly like America, actually," Stephen said contemplatively. "It's as big and spread out, but there are some odd qualitative differences if you're there for long enough. For one thing, their political situation is a lot more like the one here, so it's a little easier to follow." He shrugged. "They seem to be more against guns than the Americans, but there are just as many people there who hunt for subsistence to an extent that the actual gun numbers aren't much lower." He added, "The one thing I remember most from them both, though, is just how . . . large both countries are. The distances are just so incredibly enormous."

Smiling a little sadly, Connor told him, "I sort of always wanted to go travelling. I mean, what it must be like to live somewhere that's bigger than the whole of Europe but is still a country." He shook his head. "I have a cousin who went and was planning to do some sort of driving tour. He emailed back that he'd had to give up that idea when someone explained that it would take him weeks just to get from New York to California if he was going to also visit all the tourist stops on the way." The smile got a little amused as he added, "Pete said girls thought his accent was sexy just because he was from the UK and that I should come out because I could get a girl just by talking at her."

"It works to an extent," Stephen said grinning. "They think it's exotic."

"Weird," Connor said, shaking his head.

They reached radiology and Connor was lifted into the machines, one after another, patiently lying there as they took shot after shot of the inside of his head. Then they were walked back up to the room and left to their own devices again. "So, what's this about Coronation Street?" Stephen asked when they got back and Connor promptly turned on some dreadful sort of daytime television programme.

"Well, I figured that maybe the reason these were popular is because the people watching aren't so smart," Connor said. "And since I'm not as smart as I used to be right now, I should see if I can't see what they see in them. See?"

Stephen narrowed his eyes at his young friend. "You did that on purpose."

"Maybe," Connor admitted unashamedly. "But I still want to know." Then he perked up. "Forget that. Art Attack's on!"

Stephen sank back in his chair laughing as Connor eagerly watched the man on the screen build some crafty animal or other out of loo roll, glue and plastic bags. Then he made a strange sort of collage on the ground out of piles of children's clothing, rope, footballs, football jerseys, goal nets and a stack of uncoloured fan paraphernalia. He wouldn't have thought any adult could watch a show like that for pleasure without taking some sort of experience-enhancing illegal substance, but Connor was unashamedly enjoying it. When the talking statue came on, he asked, "You watch this often?"

"Abby's banned me from touching the newspaper once we've both read it, and the loo roll can't leave the bathroom." He pouted. "She got mad 'cause Rex got into the paint and got footprints all over the windows."

Abby spoke from the doorway. "And because you destroyed another of my hairdryers with one of those projects, and it wasn't even to build something for the anomalies, it was just so that you could have an armature for the papier-mâché."

"You just don't like fun," Connor grumbled.

She rolled her eyes, handing Connor a case full of DVDs, but the smile she wore was affectionate. "Such an idiot," she told him, then kissed his cheek. "I brought the case you asked for."

"Thank you, Abby," Connor said obediently. Then he looked at her suspiciously. "You didn't slip any of your romances in there, did you?"

As the pair began to banter about their respective appalling taste, Stephen flipped the case open and began to go through it. Abby had, indeed, slipped romances in there. Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant . . . "Really Abby?" Stephen couldn't help it. "I never would have pictured you a fan of . . . Mickey Blue Eyes? Really?"

"It's appalling, isn't it?" Connor said with a smile.

"Zardoz?" Stephen asked, unable to help the sardonic lift of an eyebrow.

"It's got Sean Connery in it," Connor protested.

Abby snorted. "'The penis is evil'?" she said to Connor, who flushed.

"I'm fairly sure I don't want to know," Stephen said. "Don't you have any good films in here?"

"Like what?" the pair chorused.

"Philadelphia Story, Father Goose, The Thin Man, Adam's Rib?"

"You mean old films?" Connor asked in the same tone of voice he might have asked if Stephen was sexually attracted to octogenarians.

"I mean classics," Stephen defended. "Real ones, not your, 'This has Connery in it,' rubbish."

"This is going to make film night harder," Connor said to Abby.

She nodded, then turned to Stephen. "So, I guess when we go to the video store I'll have to stand up for Connor's side too."

"You'd better phone," Connor said, "Or I'm telling everyone at the ARC about the costume for your Year four school play."

"You wouldn't dare."

He just glared. "You promised you wouldn't tell anyone about the time the rugby team made me eat two plates of sausages in the canteen at school and I vomited all over the headmistress. How'd that get out to everyone in IT if you didn't tell anyone?"

The back and forth between Connor and Abby was effortless and Stephen felt fairly excluded. It was good that Connor's roommate got along so well with him, and Connor's obvious interest in Abby had clearly not caused much trouble with their living arrangements, strange as they were. Eventually Abby left to check in at the ARC, leaving Stephen alone with Connor again.

Connor sagged back against the pillows. "Thank God."

"I thought you liked Abby," Stephen said.

"I do," Connor whined. "But she came in here, all demanding that I cheer up, and that it could have been worse and I shouldn't whinge about how bad I've got it, and I just . . . didn't want to argue."

Well, if Connor wasn't going to stand up for his right to complain, Stephen wasn't going to do that for him. After all, Abby was right that Connor couldn't spend all his time in a funk over what he might have lost. He was still incredibly intelligent, and while Stephen had discovered he didn't seem to have it in himself to push Connor about it, it was a good thing someone did. So he just changed the topic.

Eventually, as it so often did, conversation wended its way back to the anomaly project. "Have you made any progress on those calculations you wanted to get done for Cutter?"

Connor frowned. "I think so. It's . . . I think I know what's wrong, I mean, why I was having trouble, but . . ." he trailed off, shrugging.

"What is it?" If there was one thing Stephen had learned in the time he'd known Connor, it was that he tended to need to think aloud to process his ideas.

"I need to learn how to concentrate on one thing," Connor said, as though admitting a grievous fault in himself. "See, I sort of multitask a lot, 'cause it gets boring if I spend too long on one thing." He looked mournfully at the computer. "But I can't, and I'm falling behind on things."

Stephen turned the computer to himself and saw two emails open that Connor was in the middle of responding to, and how he was doing that with his hands the way they were he was going to have to find out, one page filled with a variety of equations, Connor's database of dinosaurs, which he seemed to be in the middle of updating and a set of directives from the university regarding how Connor could re-enter the stream there to finish up his thesis and viva.

"So, close everything down and just work on one thing, Connor. If you can't do them all at once, step back and just do one thing at a time." Connor's eyes slid away, and Stephen knew he was castigating himself for being 'stupid' again. "Most of us can't do this, Connor. I'm not going to argue that you feel handicapped right now and it's not right that you are, but until you recover, you'll just have to work within your limitations. Now," he said. "Let me see your hands, because you're not supposed to be using them right now."

Sheepishly, Connor showed him a set of fingers in stained bandages. Stephen hit the call button. "I didn't mean to go on so long," Connor explained, "But Ashley in IT needed to know something about the ARC's network and then Leigh needed to know something about the direction the ceratopsian lines would have evolved, something about her DNA testing, and Cutter wants the equations done _and_my new thesis, and I haven't looked at Morrison's stuff since his class because it was stupid, and all my passwords for the university are gone since I don't go there anymore, so I had to hack the journals database to get started on the research-"

A hand over his mouth stopped Connor quite effectively. "Connor, stop and breathe. Why is IT asking you things about the ARC's network?"

Connor shrugged. "Well, keeping the ADD integrated with the regular network is a lot of trouble because every time I upgrade it throws the system out of whack, so I have to liaise with them. Anyhow, Cutter wants access to the ADD for plotting and mapping and the like, so I have to keep it connected to the system, rather than separating it out the way I wanted to originally." He went into a long and technical explanation of how he would have kept the two linked, that boiled down to a lack of time and repeated incompetence on the part of the people who were supposed to run the IT department. "They keep burning out, and I don't blame them what with the fact that the Home Office picked a bunch of stuff that's cheap but incompatible, in terms of both the hardware and the software, but they're just standard office worker types, they don't really understand how critical it all is."

"So, what you're saying is, you run the IT department in your free time," Stephen said slowly.

Connor flushed. "Well, I wouldn't say I run it, but Ashley's not in charge, not really, and he's bad at delegating."

"That's why you're getting an email from someone named Mark asking you to explain how to get Cutter's printer working again?"

Connor rolled his eyes. "That's just Cutter. He's like Dr. Grant. Destroys a lot of computers just by touching them."

"Who?" Stephen asked, trying to think of anyone named Grant in either the university or the ARC.

"Alan Grant? Jurassic Park?" Connor prompted. "You know, 'The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know... try to show a little respect.'"

There wasn't anything Stephen could say to that. "You can remember something that random and you're worried about your intellect?"

"I've watched that film 23 times," Connor said. "It's not the same thing at all." He shook his head. "That's not the point. I just wish I could ask Duncan to take it. He was always the best at OS work of the three of us."

"Duncan?" Stephen asked incredulously. "Your friend that helped steal the dodo? This-is-all-a-government-conspiracy, Duncan?"

"Stephen," Connor said, laughing. "It _is_a government conspiracy." Before he could deny it, Connor added, "And even if it weren't, put yourself in his shoes. Remember the interrogation room? The soldiers? The spotlight on that nifty glowy table?"

He winced. "So, you want to ask Lester to bring your friend in?"

"What, you think I'm stupid? Duncan might be the person who gets my programming style best and all, but can you imagine Lester . . ." he paused. "Let's ask anyway. Imagine Lester's face."

It hadn't really solved any of the problems Connor was facing, but Stephen was suddenly faced with the image of Lester, and Cutter for that matter, if asked by Connor to bring that Duncan fellow in, and he couldn't help laughing along with Connor.

Once the nurses had come, changed Connor's dressing on his hands, scolded Stephen for letting Connor type, then left in a flurry, Stephen took up the job of being Connor's hands on the keyboard and promised himself that he'd get his revenge for all of Connor's snide remarks about his incompetence with computers by dragging Connor out to deal with all the practical lab work he avoided in favour of his computers, not to mention a bit of harassing him on the shooting range and some physical training to get his own back.

Of course, when the image of Connor, sweating and shirtless (and his memory could supply him with that image now, since by the end of his stretch in Leek's menagerie he had been) danced briefly across his mind, Stephen was forced to admit that he wasn't being punch drunk, he was just interested in Connor.

With the afternoon wearing on and Connor still recovering, he drifted off to sleep not long after and Stephen was left alone to sit next to him and just watch the afternoon light play across his face. Oddly enough, Connor actually looked a little older in sleep, as the childlike glee he took in things around him was smoothed away to show the young man underneath. The light stubble that was always there stopped looking lazy, like a student who hadn't enough time to shave properly, and took away those last possible hints of childishness.

His jaw line was square and sharply defined. What little softness there had been when the project first started (which was much less than Stephen had thought once Connor lost that incredibly bulky coat of his) had turned to muscle. In fact, Connor's hadn't been so much soft then, as poor and underfed. Underneath that bulky coat he'd been almost waifish until solid pay by the ARC, combined with constantly running for his life had turned him to something sleek. He'd never be bulky at this rate, but Connor's whipcord tension was better suited to slender anyhow.

Without his hats and gloves, his waistcoats and scarves, it was as though he was stripped to the essence of what lay underneath, and Stephen found his hand gently shifting a bit of Connor's hair off his face. Connor's head turned, following the motion in his sleep, murmuring something inaudible.

He was so fucked.

It was the next day when they finally got the results of all the scans of Connor's brain. The damage was evident in darkened areas. The doctors said that Connor was lucky he was both so high functioning, and that the crippled areas were so relatively small. They were mostly like the results of small strokes, causing some damage to Connor's small motor skills and his cognitive centres. Nothing serious, and nothing that would have impaired him in any way if he had a normal job.

Connor was devastated, and Stephen discovered that every time he stepped out of the room, he'd come back to Connor staring dolefully at the pictures with their dark spots on dead tissue.

He wasn't even cheered by the fact that all the doctors had pointed out numerous incidents where the human brain had regenerated around the damage, creating new neural connections that bypassed the problem and allowed the person to return to their full previous function. All he could see was that he had been damaged in the one thing he saw as useful to the ARC.

So when the self-proclaimed 'logistics and backup' came back to the ARC, Stephen let Abby be the one to harass Connor about not whining and Cutter be the one to push all of Connor's boundaries and Lester to be his usual irritatingly beaurocratic self. He would be the one who reminded Connor that his best was good enough, and that he had to just do one thing at a time. Still, he'd never really realised what Connor did at the ARC. Sure, he knew about the database and the ADD, but until then, he'd generally thought that Connor's role was mostly one of floater assistant to the other three.

But he'd underestimated what Connor did because he could multitask so well. He could run the lab tests for Stephen so that Stephen was free to do the analyses of dung and blood and metabolism and the like that he specialised in, while using that information to update his database in a variety of ways, often relating to physiological details of several animals from the same Family or Genus. He'd do the same when Abby was taking apart the behavioural details of the animals they had to keep at the ARC, as well as the various plants and their adaptations. He'd do the maths for Cutter, freeing up Nick's mind to work on the actual theory once he had hard numbers, but Connor was usually punching those into a separate analysis of the anomalies, helping him finesse the ADD and other gadgets he was forever trying out.

But he also used that time to run the IT department of people hired to make sure the network ran fine and everyone could use their printers and office email when they needed it. It was an entirely mundane job, but it was a full time one, and Connor had somehow fit in about half of the work of IT department head in, around everything else he did. It wasn't all the time, because when they'd had an IT head Connor left well enough alone, but apparently the whole lot were too intimidated by Lester to speak up when they lost their department head and usually applied to Connor to fill in the gap.

It was killing him now, and Stephen could see Connor trying to maintain the same punishing schedule (no wonder he never showed up for his mandatory physical training time with the rest of the team even before the . . . incident, he didn't have the spare time to do it), but without the physical or mental wherewithal to do it.

_"I just wish I could ask Duncan to take it. He was always the best at OS work of the three of us . . . Duncan might be the person who gets my programming style best . . ."_

He couldn't get the look in Connor's eyes when he talked about the remaining one of his two friends out of his head. Connor was, if nothing else, brilliant. If he truly thought his friend Duncan could and would handle the job well . . . well, they'd all thought Connor couldn't handle it.

It was, quite possibly, the weirdest time he'd ever had explaining anything to anyone.

"So, you're saying that Connor lied about the mind control, but there are rifts in the space-time continuum to other periods in Earth's history, which is where the dodo came from, and Connor's been working with a secret government outfit to deal with the incursions of dinosaurs and the like?" Duncan asked.

Stephen nodded. He wasn't quite sure what he'd have to say to convince the . . . no, there was no other word for it, idiot in the bobble hat in front of him. Still, the first step was explaining.

"You said there wasn't a conspiracy," Duncan pointed out.

Wincing, because his declaration that, 'There is no conspiracy,' had been a statement of utmost ingenuousness to the point of idiocy, Stephen said, "Connor pointed out that, just because I don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't one."

"You sure there's no mind control?" Duncan asked. "Because hiding glowy portals that lead to 65 million years ago at the behest of the government is a pretty big conspiracy," he said shrewdly.

He _was_Connor's friend. Stephen would have to remember that. Because Connor was too smart to be friends with utter idiots. "I'm quite sure," Stephen assured him. "I was just . . . in denial about it all. I wanted to try to inform the public."

Duncan stared at him. "That they might get eaten by velociraptors at any second?" he asked. "Why not just tell everyone now's a good time to riot?"

Was he the only person who thought telling people was a good idea?

He told Duncan what Connor had said and was shocked to see the kid nearly tear up. "He said that?" Eyes lit up in happiness, he added, "He said he wanted me to have a spot in a top-secret government cover-up of space-time rifts and dinosaurs?"

"He said you got his programming best, and that our IT people can't seem to keep from clashing with his work on the detection system he set up," Stephen temporised.

"A whole IT department," Duncan said with a look in his eyes rather like the time that Cutter had been told there was a possibility for a properly funded cross-continental study of ceratopsian dinosaurs and their relative evolutionary characteristics. It was also uncomfortably like the look in Helen's eyes that time she'd hijacked him in the showers at the gym at the university after an intramural game of football. She'd been talking about sweaty boys doing things to her libido, and . . . well, he had to stop thinking about that before it put him in a bad mood.

Or he started thinking about sweaty Connor. . . . too late.

He shook it off and sneaked Duncan into the ARC. Showed him to the IT room and gave him a few notes about what he knew about the system.

It seemed Duncan had hidden depths too, because he'd taken command of the room of techs, whose job it was to keep the ARC's regular computer systems running, and was delegating and organising within moments. Fifteen minutes after that, Connor arrived, asking who was messing with the system, and practically ready for a showdown with whoever was on his territory. Then he saw Duncan, saw Stephen standing off to the side, bemused at the whole scene and scampered over. "Thank you," he said as he threw himself at Stephen, hugging him for all he was worth.

Stephen tried very hard not to take it all the wrong way, thinking longingly of cold showers and wondering what he could do until he was able to have one of those, to take the edge off. The sight of Connor and Duncan degenerating into a conversation about how to decorate the IT room in a Jurassic Park theme, and whether they should change all the ARC's screensavers to read, "You had one job, Phil!" took the edge off very quickly.

Jenny and Lester were going to kill him.

Still, the brilliant smile on Connor's face was enough to power the lights for half the National Grid, and the sight made Stephen happy. The way Connor relaxed through the rest of the day, all his tension about the IT department gone (and all the computers, printers, email and network issues practically evaporating under Duncan's surprising competence) gave Connor a loose-limbed sort of relaxed look, and Stephen got tense all over again, picturing that relaxation in other settings.

It must have been the distraction that made him agree to join Abby and Connor at their flat for a film night, but it was stupidity that made him argue with both of them against Antonio Banderas as Zorro. Connor was agreeing to the action and because Zorro was an 'old school superhero', Abby agreed because she wanted to leer at the Spanish actor in his prime, and Stephen argued because it was a trashy film and he wanted to watch something good. It all somehow led to the three of them watching Errol Flynn as Robin Hood instead.

* * *

It was a long road to recovery for Connor. Even after the physical problems cleared up, he still went through days of depression from the handicaps he felt he had. It was felt all over the ARC, as the various scientists could no longer bounce ideas off him because what they studied wasn't Connor's area of expertise. The technology he tended to be in the middle of inventing at all times was stalled because the facile mind that let him learn the engineering skills along the way by stopping in the middle to dig up an answer and then go on, couldn't take in the information fast enough anymore for it to be a valid way of working.

Connor's time was eaten up by handling the ADD, running the central database of creatures and finishing his thesis anyhow, so that was what he did. It was hard on him, though. He felt useless, more so when he wasn't in the field to discover what the new addition, Captain Becker discovered on accident, that a jolt of electricity could somehow temporarily make an anomaly ball up and keep anything from getting through, and what Sarah Page, their newest addition, had figured out, that enough of a magnetic field around an anomaly, and you could move it.

Stephen had nearly had to sit on Connor to remind him that he had work, locking anomalies could wait, as could magnetic experiments with moving anomalies, and he already had a full plate of work. Not to mention that Stephen wasn't going to let him shirk on his training anymore. He took the time to force Connor to run the laps once he as well enough again, and got him onto the firing range and generally to do all those things he hadn't done before because no one had seemed to care enough to ensure he got those desperately needed skills for field work.

In return, his flat became a sanctuary for Connor, someplace the younger man hid when he needed to work without the distractions Abby offered, because she just hadn't quite caught on to the problems Connor was having with adjusting to his new mental paradigm.

Stephen both loved and hated these visits. On the one hand, he hadn't stopped being interested in Connor, in fact, chivvying Connor around the track was a favourite pastime as he ran just a little behind Connor to keep him moving, and he'd begun to work with him on rifles, just so he had an excuse to adjust Connor's stances and holds all over again. He hated them, because Connor would come into his flat and make himself at home, sprawled over the furniture, making Stephen want to shove the laptop away from him and just . . . do things to Connor.

Today, though, he just wanted to have a hot shower and collapse into bed. Cutter's accurate prediction of the anomaly in the house had still been a hell of a day. He'd been tossed into walls by that squirrely little chameleon monster, and the fact that a man ten years older than himself had been so bloody cheerful and capable and had garnered such admiring looks from the team had made Stephen perhaps a tad more . . . macho about his bumps and bruises than he ought to have been.

So now he was home, and all he wanted was to nurse his bruises and his ego. Naturally Connor arrived at his door a moment later, grousing about Nick's egotistical joy about his correct prediction. It wasn't until Stephen bent forward, reaching for the beer on the end table, hissing and wincing as his knotted muscles and bruises spoke up that Connor stopped. "Are you alright?"

"Just took a few hits from that . . . thing," Stephen said wryly.

Connor stood, then plonked down next to him, reaching over to pat him on the back. "Well, at least you'll be better soon . . . your back's one massive knot, isn't it?" Connor said, pulling back his hand.

"Yeah, it is," Stephen told him. "I was going to have a shower and-"

"Just take your shirt off and lie on the bed," Connor told him. "I used to do this for Tom. He'd get some really wicked knots after spending all day under a desk working." He was in Stephen bathroom a moment later, puttering around, and coming out with a tube of analgesic muscle rub. "Well?"

He was too sore to even think about the casual way Connor has asked for his shirt off. Instead, figuring that Connor probably couldn't make it worse, and _could_reach the difficult bits on his back with the rub, Stephen just dragged his shirt off and dropped onto the bed. There was the sound of the lid opening and the squirt of the paste from the tube, a brief pause as Connor moved up to him, then . . .

Bliss. Clearly Connor really _did_know something as his hands smoothed the rub in first, then gradually increased the pressure just right. All Stephen's tension eased away and he was even able to think charitable thoughts about Danny Quinn, Super-Detective. Well, sort-of charitable thoughts, anyhow.

He didn't want to think about Quinn right then. Connor's fingers dug in, and Stephen couldn't quite suppress a small, rather embarrassing wriggle when Connor's hands pressed down into his lower back. The pain was gone, and with the pain leaving, Stephen was uncomfortably aware of the fact that he had no shirt on and Connor had his hands all over Stephen. He didn't want it to stop, but if it went on much longer, he was going to start doing things to his bedsheets he shouldn't do to bedsheets.

Oh God. Connor had just got onto the bed, straddled Stephen and continued working. A whimper was caught in his throat, trying to escape, but Stephen couldn't let it. He had his dignity, after all.

One last pass, then Connor's hands left and didn't come back. He was still settled over Stephen's arse. "There," he said, his voice sounding a little strange. Strained, maybe. "All done. Feel better?"

"Yes," Stephen replied. For a moment he contemplated how to hide his erection when Connor got off him, then the same reckless feeling that overtook him the night he set fire to his mattress and nearly burned down his flat roared up again. He rolled over, not giving his impromptu masseuse the chance to get away, snagged Connor's wrist and pulled the other man forward so he could kiss him.

Connor let out a startled squawk into Stephen's mouth. For a moment, Stephen felt a twinge of worry about whether this was unwanted and if he had just ruined a perfectly good friendship, just the way he'd ruined a perfectly good mattress.

Then Connor's body eased down, his mouth softening and beginning to work _with_Stephen, and oh-how-incredible, Connor pressed a cock that felt as hard as Stephen's into Stephen's hip. "Was going mad," Connor murmured as he pulled his mouth away, only to attack Stephen's neck.

Gasping, Stephen told him, "Been thinking about this since you were in the hospital." He bucked and was answered by Connor's hips pressing back, and the pressure between them was so _good_. "Wanted to get into the bed with you."

"God, me too," Connor moaned. They'd had that conversation before, about changing perspectives, when Stephen had apologised for the way he'd treated Connor before. The menagerie had marked a turning point for both of them as friends, and, it seemed, as more-than-friends. "Thought I was going to have to go home and hide from Abby again."

"Wanking?' Stephen asked, laughing. Now that the die had been cast and rolled in his favour, he could afford to relax, grab Connor's arse and grind their cocks together. "That's what I'd have been doing if you'd left."

"Oh God," Connor moaned again between kisses. "Now I'm thinking about that. S'bloody hot."

This was brilliant, but it would be better with fewer clothes, and Stephen pulled away enough to yank all three layers of Connor's tops off at once, sending a button flying off the waistcoat, then rolled them over so that he could take some control of things.

Connor was, if anything, better built now than in the tainted memories of the menagerie, but his body was still criss-crossed with the scars from teeth and claws. It looked wrong, somehow, on the body of the techie geek who, before the anomalies, had never faced anything more dangerous than a videogame monster. Although, he did claim to have crossed a London roundabout during the morning rush hour once, straight across the full diameter, on a dare.

Stephen wasn't thinking of rush hour, though, just then. He was thinking he was going to run his tongue over every one of those scars that Connor had received saving the lives of thousands of people. As his tongue traced over the first of a set of claw marks from one of the raptors, Connor made a strangled sound and pressed himself upward, trying to grind against Stephen's hip. When he teasingly pulled back, preferring instead to get to the next two marks in quick succession, Connor actually growled.

One of the hands that had been clutching at his back slid around to the front, flicked open Stephen's jeans, and Stephen couldn't keep himself from shouting as it grabbed his cock and squeezed, just right. His eyes slammed shut and he hissed as the sensation spiked through him. When he managed to wrench his eyes open again, Connor was half sitting up, a sexy smirk on his face as he used his talented hands to turn Stephen into putty all over again. This reality was so much better than all the fantasies Stephen had had over the last several months, that it all came together as his hips snapped back and forth a few more times, and then the top of his head came off.

He found himself draped atop Connor, who looked quite wound up, but incredibly pleased with himself.

Competitive as he was, Stephen chose to take that as a challenge and nearly tore Connor's trousers in his haste to get Connor out of them. Before anything could be said, he dove forward, his lips wrapping around the tip of his lover's erection, and he could hear Connor coming apart above him. It had been a while since he'd done this, but it seemed he wasn't out of practice, as Connor's hands couldn't seem to settle on anything, fluttering between Stephen's hair, the sheets and the headboard. "Stephen! God, I . . . ah!"

A little deeper and adding a little more pressure, and Stephen settled in, encouraging Connor's hips to set up a rhythm. It didn't take Connor much longer to come himself, and Stephen rather liked to think it was because Connor had been in as desperate a state as he'd been.

Connor half-naked and dishevelled was one of the sexiest sights Stephen had ever seen, and he stripped his trousers and shoes fully off, then did the same for Connor. Even as he got hard and saw Connor doing the same and they argued about who was going to be on top this time and the next, naked and entwined with Connor, it felt like coming home.

When Connor's brain did, in fact, properly rewire itself to allow Connor to return to his accustomed genius, Stephen found it a point of pride he was the one thing Connor couldn't multitask with.

The End


End file.
